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Millions of people in Illinois experience poverty or are living on the brink. That societal position keeps opportunities out of reach and nearly guarantees worse outcomes in every quality of life domain—making ALL of us worse off.
This fact sheet on poverty, income, and health insurance coverage in Illinois and the Chicago region, was created using the Census Bureau's release of local American Community Survey data.
The poverty rate for the United States was 12.3% in 2017. There were 39.7 million people in poverty nationwide. The poverty rate is not significantly different from the pre-recession level of 12.5% in 2007. In 2017, 1.6 million Illinoisans were in poverty ─ a rate of 12.6%. Additionally, 2.0 million Illinoisans are near poor and economically insecure with incomes between 100% and 199% of the federal poverty threshold.

Heartland Alliance's Illinois Poverty Update indicates that millions of people in Illinois are experiencing poverty or are on the cusp. Rooted in inequity, poverty prevents people from meeting basic needs, improving their quality of life, and creates barriers to opportunities including quality education, stable employment, affordable housing and safe neighborhoods. The update sheds light on who is most likely to experience poverty in Illinois: Women, people of color, and children have the highest poverty rates.
In addition to the Illinois Poverty Update, Heartland Alliance also released state legislative district poverty fact sheets.
These releases are the first of a series Heartland Alliance is publishing on poverty in Illinois this year. Local- and county-level data books will be published this summer, and an in-depth exploration of the forces that contribute to gender-based poverty inequity will be released in the fall.

Illinois is among the first states in the nation to pass retirement savings legislation in the form of Secure Choice. With the implementation of Secure Choice, workers in Illinois at qualifying businesses without access to an employment-based retirement plan will be automatically enrolled in a retirement savings program. An estimated 1.3 million Illinoisans who currently do not have access to workplace retirement plans will be potentially impacted by Secure Choice. As Illinois moves toward Secure Choice implementation,however, there are a number of key questions that should be answered to help ensure that the program is addressing barriers to participation, especially among low-income workers, women, immigrants, and workers of color. This research is aimed at better understanding these barriers.

Chicago is currently facing a devastating surge in lethal violence in addition to staggering rates of poverty across Illinois. Policymakers and community leaders are struggling with finding short- and long-term solutions to stem the violence and allow neighborhoods to heal. In the meantime, communities are fearing for their own safety and grieving over lost parents, children, friends, and leaders every day. The stakes forgetting the solutions right could not be higher. Poverty and violence often intersect, feed one another, and share root causes. Neighborhoods with high levels of violence are also characterized by high levels of poverty, lack of adequate public services and educational opportunity, poorer health outcomes, asset and income inequality, and more. The underlying socioeconomic conditions in these neighborhoods perpetuate both violence and poverty. Furthermore, trauma can result from both violence and poverty. Unaddressed trauma worsens quality of life, makes it hard to rise out of poverty by posing barriers to success at school and work, and raises the likelihood of aggressive behavior. In this way, untreated trauma—coupled with easy gun availability and other factors—feeds the cycle of poverty and violence.

L'Arche Chicago (www.larchechicago.org) is a non-profit organization in Oak Park, IL that provides high quality health, housing, and social services to people with with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD), whom L'Arche terms "core members." L'Arche Chicago's unique model of care differs from other community-integrated living arrangements (CILA) in that staff, assistants, and core members live together in homes and develop mutually-transforming relationships through shared life experiences. L'Arche Chicago opened its doors in 2000 with one home, two core members, and two assistants. Today, L'Arche Chicago has three homes, two of which opened in the past four years, and a total of nine core members and fourteen assistants.
As L'Arche Chicago has grown, and anticipates further growth, the organization recognized a need to be able to define, visualize, and express their larger organizational theory of change and identify and track outcomes to measure L'Arche's impact on members, assistants, and the wider community. To do this, the Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation collaborated with the Social IMPACT Research Center (IMPACT) to provide technical assistance to L'Arche Chicago with the goal of developing a theory of change

New Moms (www.newmoms.org) is a non-profit organization based in the Austin neighborhood in Chicago and in Oak Park, IL that provides wraparound health, housing, and social services to young moms. New Moms utilizes an integrated, participant (and woman)-centered approach to interrupt the two-generation cycle of poverty, by focusing on critical life services both for moms and children. The current program structure is built on a three-pronged approach of housing, family support services, and job training, with over arching support and referral services infused throughout all programming.
The New Moms SROI study encompassed October 2015 - September 2017, and included all young women who exited any of the three New Moms program areas during this time and who fell below 138% of the Federal Poverty Line.
The findings show that investing in New Moms generates nearly a 4-fold return for every dollar invested. This SROI clearly makes the case that transitional supportive housing, paired with holistic wrap around services, is a critical intervention, specifically for young moms. If, as a society, we believe in investing in breaking the two-generation cycle of poverty, then the value provided by this model should serve as a clear call to investment.

In July 2012, the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership (The Partnership) was awarded a three-yearWorkforce Innovation Fund (WIF) grant from the U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration. The purpose of The Partnership's WIF project was to design, implement, and test an integrated workforce management information system (MIS), later named Career Connect, that:- Contains comprehensive and useful program- and customer-specific measures acrossfunding streams- Supports varied reporting capabilities; and- Provides the information necessary to adequately serve the needs of the workforce system'scustomers.
The functional goal for the project is to have all Cook County workforce providers that receiveWorkforce Investment and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Title I funds (delegate agencies) using CareerConnect as their data system of record. This included 49 delegate agencies when the project beganand 53 by the time Career Connect was fully implemented in June 2017. Additionally, the goal is toinvite non-WIOA workforce providers to also use the system, though The Partnership cannot mandate its use for non-WIOA providers.
In the following study, we:- Assess whether Career Connect achieved its desired outcomes;- Document the context and operations of Career Connect's design;- Assess the degree to which it was implemented as designed; and- Evaluate stakeholder participation.

These are Heartland Alliance's comments in response to the USDA's Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) regarding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWD) time limit. As these comments reflect, Heartland Alliance is deeply concerned by attempts to further restrict food assistance to the individuals whom we serve. SNAP is the country's most important anti-hunger program. We strongly support the goal of helping SNAP participants obtain and keep quality jobs that enable them to achieve economic security. However, we believe the restrictions suggested in the ANPRM would only result in more people losing their SNAP benefits, which will make it harder to achieve this goal. Furthermore, the questions posed in the ANPRM 1) appear to be based on the assumption that many SNAP participants simply do not want to work, which we know to be untrue and 2) overlook the reality that many individuals receiving nutrition assistance face multiple barriers to work that reflect personal challenges such as education or skills gaps and more insidious structural labor market barriers such as discrimination in the labor market.

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About These Reports

The Social IMPACT Research Center has an extensive portfolio of needs assessment and evaluation research on issues facing poor and low-income populations. Our user-friendly work equips nonprofits, foundations, and governments to advance real-world solutions to poverty.